I'm a Runner: Peter Sagal

The host of NPR's quiz show, "Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me!" prepares to run his first Boston Marathon.

So the story goes that you were overweight as a kid before you found running. How overweight were you? It's lost in legend. I was a pudgy kid and was never athletic at all. My father had been running for a long time. My father is just about to turn 70. He was part of this first generation of runners. He went out and bought Jim Fixx's book. And I would make fun of him, "What a silly thing to do."

I remember standing in front of the mirror, I was 15, I was this pudgy kid, still had traces of childhood asthma, I had acne. I thought, I can't do anything about that, but maybe I could do something about the other thing. So I asked my father, I said, "Can I go running with you tomorrow?" Again, I stress the fact that I had been mocking him. Mockery, then my hobby, now my business. I had been mocking him for years about this. To his credit, he didn't say, "Aha, now you want to go. Now you want to run up and down the street like an idiot." He said, "OK, I'll wake you up at 6 a.m." And he did.

And I guess in the way that you remember traumas very vividly, I remember strapping on these flat-bottomed Ked sneakers, all I had, and managing maybe half a mile before I just collapsed. My feet were hurting and my lungs were on fire. And I slinked on home while he just kept going.

And then I did something, which to this day despite anything else I've ever done I remain probably the proudest of: I got up the next day and did it again. And I had this-I guess it's a similar story to a lot of people. If you can just get through that first week, all of a sudden you start to rapidly improve. I actually really took to it. By the time I graduated high school, I was a fairly avid runner. I was on my cross-country team and I lost a lot of weight, in fact almost too much weight. I became, like a lot of adolescents do, a little obsessive about it. I was out running, four to seven miles a day. It got a little nutty.

So you were pretty competitive on your high school team?I wasn't really competitive. In a weird way, I found the competitive nature of being on the team a little difficult to deal with. I just liked to run. And they just wanted me to beat people. I always felt bad about trying to beat people. And even worse about getting beaten. So I wasn't a very successful cross-country runner. In fact, it was around that time I discovered the much-more-to-my-sensibility glory of community races, 10Ks. This would be like 1981 or 1982. It was great because you would go and run these 10Ks and somebody would beat you and you would beat somebody. It was much more low-key. That was much more my speed. Released from the obligation of actually having to beat person X, I would actually go after it with some avidity and try to do as well as I could.

So did you run in college? No. I didn't run competitively, God knows, I was never near that level. High school was until recently sort of the highlight of my running career. And what I did, and I imagine a lot of people are like this, they go though adult life and depending on various distractions, they run or not, depending on the circumstances. I tried to keep exercising in college. My weight would fluctuate. I didn't become serious about running again for a long time.

I lived in LA the first five years after college, and I found that running in LA is difficult. The air is hard to breathe. And then, really, we're talking about 20 years, a period in which my running went up and down. When I was 29, around the time I got married, I got back into it, ran another race, my first10K in 10 years. It was like, "Oh wow, this is fun, I remember this." I was serious about it again.

Then we got married, we moved around, we ended up living in New York, I would go jogging around Prospect Park in Brooklyn. I sort of became as I got into my 30s a standard jogger and not particularly fast or good or regular about it. I do remember, though, that when my first daughter was born, one of the coolest presents I got was a baby jogger.

So what was the motivation for you to do the 2005 Chicago Marathon?A couple of things. The starting thing was, we ended up in Chicago, and now for the first time in a long time, I have a fulltime job. I had been working as a freelance writer, which meant I could get up in the middle of the day and decide to go running. But now I'm working a fulltime job, I've got kids (three daughters), so my free time is minimal. I'm not exercising very much. I go to the doctor, this was around 2000. The doctor weighs me and I weigh 200 pounds. I'm 5'7". This is not a good thing. It's like, "Oy."

Did he lecture you about it?He didn't say a word. As far as he was concerned, I was just this rotund, bald, Jewish guy and that's what I weighed. But I was horrified. Around the same time I read a book called "Absolutely American." It's a great book. I highly recommend it. It's a book about West Point. One of the characters of the book is this cadet who has a lot of trouble at West Point. He ends up being the hero of the book. He's so not a typical West Point student. He's slow and slovenly and Jewish as well. And his great struggle is that he can't do the running, the physical requirement of all students. You have to run two miles in 17 minutes.

I became obsessed with this guy. I was thinking, Two miles in 17 minutes; I used to be able to do that. Could I do that? So one day I got out and I put my middle daughter who was 2 at the time in the jogging stroller and tried to run 2 miles in 17 minutes, and I couldn't quite do it. I said, "I should be able to do this." I started running again more and more seriously and started losing weight. I entered a race in 2004, a 10K, that went right by my house. I did surprisingly well-under 45 minutes.

And then, I turned 40. And I had to choose from a menu of midlife crises. And I decided to run the marathon. I decided it would be cheaper and less destructive than the sports car or the girlfriend. And I told everyone, "I'm going to run the marathon next year." And I did.

And your wife doesn't begrudge you the three hours you need every weekend to train? Well, she's not happy about it. As she says when she looks at me after I get back from a three-hour training run, "This makes you happy, right?" And I say, "Yes, yes, it does." She says, "OK then."

And then do you still have energy to play with your girls? I have found that the more I run and the better shape I'm in, the more energy I have the rest of the day. Back in the period when I weighed 200 pounds, that low point in my fitness, I'd go to work and about 2 in the afternoon I'd feel so sleepy. I'd be sneaking around the radio station looking for a place to lie down.

So you told everyone you were running the marathon?I think I even did this to myself consciously so I would have to do it. "By the way, I'm Peter, and I'm running the marathon." "Yes, that's very nice sir, but what would you like on your pizza?"

Did you say it on the air? I wasn't that dumb. But I did tell everyone I knew. It ended up being valuable. I was using one of these online training programs, where they send you an e-mail every day. I was dumb. It would say run four miles today easy, and I'd go out and run six because I could. And one day in early August of 2005, just getting into the hard part of training, I finished a run and my right hip hurt. The next day, I couldn't go back out. I had piriformis syndrome. So instead of running, I was going to physical therapy and of course I missed out on the six weeks of key training. A sane person would have said, "Well, that's it then." But I had told everyone I was going to do it. I anticipated all this, "Peter how did the marathon go?"

So I had to do it. So about two weeks before the marathon, the injury was feeling better, I had physical therapy, I said, "I'm going to go try. If I can run 10 miles without it hurting, I'm going to run the marathon." I did and I did. So my longest run before the 2005 marathon was a 14-mile training run.

So were you able to cross train at all when you had that injury? I was able to bike a little, I did Pilates, which I still do, which really doesn't help except as a kind of strength training. My great fear, if you were at all fat growing up, if you were at all overweight during any period of your childhood, and I've confirmed this with other people, you will spend the rest of your life obsessing about being fat. There's nothing you can do about it. It's like my great terror, since I couldn't run, I would immediately inflate, like Eddie Murray in "The Nutty Professor."

So how did the marathon go? It was incredibly painful. It was typical-the first 10, 12 miles it was like, "Whoa, this is so easy!" The crowds, the energy, the excitement! I crossed the halfway mark and I was like, "What am I doing next weekend? I'll do another one. This is so easy." And then I remember it got to be about mile 16 or 17, and everyone around me started quieting down. We were just crossing mile 17 and someone near me said, "Hey, is anyone else in pain?" Yeah. The last six miles were the most painful thing I've ever done. By the time I finished, the only thing that did not hurt was my right piriformis muscle. It was just agonizing. I remember calling my wife from the finish line and saying, "I'm never going to do this again." But even as I hung up, I'm thinking, I bet I'm going to change my mind about that. And ultimately, of course, did.

What bugged me was I decided as my goal I would do 4 hours, and I did 4:03. And I decided pretty quickly to do it again. And sometime in the next year I decided I was going to try to do it fast enough to qualify for Boston.

That's a huge leap. Where did you come up with that number? I made this decision before sitting down and realizing how fast I'd have to do it. To simply run it again didn't seem so exciting. Even to improve my time didn't seem exciting. Looking back on it now, I honestly think I must have been crazy. What kind of person can drop 40 minutes from their time? At this point, I'm like, What was I thinking?

What I did, I just sort of became obsessed. I continued to run pretty seriously through the winter. I joined up with the Oak Park Runners Club. And I had never run with people, I had always thought that was a silly thing to do. I'm not a joiner, and I always thought the great thing about running was you get time to yourself. All of a sudden I discovered it's a lot easier to run if there are people waiting for you at the start of your run. It's a lot easier to finish if everybody else is pushing you along. I had this group to run with.

I also for the first time entered into running culture. I would run with these guys and all we'd talk about was running. "Well, Bob ran this 10K in an amazing time..." It was so sort of weirdly comforting, to enter into this world of obsessive running. "Oh, shin splints." On one of my last training runs before the marathon, "I was like, Oh, I've got to tie my shoe." And another runner said, "I was in this race once and my shoe became untied." And another runner said, "Well, you know, you can get the little Velcro things, those are nice." And I said, "We've done it. We've finally achieved the single most boring conversation. We've been working on it for a year and we've finally done it, congratulations." And yet, I just loved it. I loved going out for an hour and running the streets of the western Chicago suburbs and talking about shin splints.

I started doing one long run a week at 7:30, 7 in the summer. We'd run 10 miles, sometimes more. Then we started doing speed work at the track on Tuesdays and tempo runs on Thursdays. I used the Marathon First training program in Runner's World. That worked out really well. I diligently cross-trained, I rode my bike to and from work, 10 miles away. Sometimes swimming. I ran a half-marathon in May and did it in 1:35. Which surprised the hell out of me. It was at that point that I realized, Maybe I could actually do this.

So you had to run a 7:38 pace to qualify for Boston.Some of those tempo runs were difficult for that reason. Some of them you're asked to do faster. I trained with a lot of guys, but as we progressed, I tried harder and harder to keep up with one. His name is Chris, and he's 33 or 34, he had already run Boston twice. So we did our last four or five weeks of training together. It worked out really well. What's interesting about him though, he was so frustrated with his finish, 3:29, he has now become obsessed with requalifying next year.

I ran 3:20:39. I qualified by 20 seconds. It was so difficult. The last few miles were so hard after one leg cramped up. And it was so difficult. I didn't know that I had done it. My watch told me I had done it, because I crossed the start line about two minutes after the gun. And I wasn't certain about that thing about Boston, they allow that extra 59 seconds. Finally when I figured out I had done it, I was euphoric, it was terrific. And then after about a week, I was like, I have to train for another marathon! What have I done!

Until your leg cramped up did you feel bad? No, I felt good. I cruised through 17 through 20 and was feeling terrific. I was like, Hey, this might work. When I broke down with that cramp it was really frustrating. It seemed like I might not even finish.

Do you have a goal yet for Boston? I haven't figured that out yet. My big goal was qualifying for Boston. And I did it. Now what? I could be there as a tourist, but that doesn't seem like fun. My parents are going to be at the finish line. I have family up there. I might have as many as two ex-girlfriends on the course. You gotta be looking good when you pass the ex-girlfriends, that's like the number-one rule. It probably would be unrealistic to improve my PR because Boston is a tougher course than Chicago.

Do you think you have, like, a 3:10 in you? My friend Chris has to do that to requalify for Boston. And in the back of my head, I'm like, Why not try to do it with him? Worst-case scenario is I'll pace him through the first half of the marathon like he did for me, and let him go, and I'll finish when I finish. But wouldn't it be cool to actually do that? The problem is, you start looking at the actual limits of what you can do. I'm this relatively short, squat person. I look more like Jason Alexander than anyone else in my natural state. I'm not a natural runner. There's got to be a limit of what I'm physically capable of it. It's interesting, how fast could I actually go? It seems to be impossible for me to run a mile quicker than six minutes on the track.

Does your wife run at all? No. She's like, why would you want to go out there and suffer? And I'm like, it's not the suffering, it's the achievement despite the suffering. The suffering makes the achievement sweeter. And she's like, "What are you talking about?" I have a feeling if she had known more about it, she would be like, "You're crazy."

Was the Boston Marathon part of your college experience when you were at Harvard? No. The Boston Marathon would happen every year and I would be like, "Huh, those crazy people. Huh, isn't that odd, that people would want to do that." It just never occurred to me. Every year there'd be an article in the Harvard Crimson about Harvard students who ran the marathon. But I felt like I was looking at another race of human beings. It never occurred to me it was even possible to do it. It didn't connect with my slow slog around the Charles River at the time.

How about the city itself? I love Boston. Not only did I go to college there, but also I spent a lot of time there growing up. My mother's family is from Boston. My uncle lived in Cambridge. It's a city where I have a lot of roots, a lot of affection. I'm a huge, lifelong Boston Red Sox fan. My paternal grandfather was the construction manager on the Prudential Center whenever it went up. My grandparents lived in Framingham. It's going to be very exciting.

Will you get a chance to train on the hills? That's a problem. I live in Chicago, and there ain't no hills. I'm already talking to friends, "Where are there hills?"

So you travel a lot with your job? We're usually on the road an average of once a month.

And you use your Garmin to train when you're on the road? That's why I got the Garmin. A lot of times we'll go out to these shows, and the night before we'll do a reception for the donors to the public radio station. One time we finished our day preparing for the show, I went out for a run, I got lost, I lost track of time, I got back late, and I showed up at the reception sweating. I had showered, but I was still sweating. I apologized to people. I would shake their hand and they would look at their hand and go, "Yuck." I said to one guy, "I'm sorry, I went running and I got lost." And he said, "You know, I've got this thing, and you strap it to your wrist and it tells you how far you've gone. It's a GPS, and you won't get lost." He actually brought it to the taping of the radio show the next day to show me.

Are you a morning or evening runner? I used to be an evening runner. But for the marathon, I had to start running in the morning, otherwise it wasn't going to happen. As the day got going, there was just too much stuff. My wife was a lot happier when I didn't come home, and she had been with the kids all day and I said, "Great to be home, I'm going out for a six-mile run."

Do you think about work when you're running?Remember George Sheehan? He wrote something like, "Never trust any thought you have when you're sitting down." I go out there running and my brain gets sort of flajumbled by my running. I start to have a thought, and then I'm like, My foot hurts. Look at that mailbox. Like everyone else, I've started to run with my iPod and even race with my iPod. What I did with the marathon was I decided I'd bring it and not use it for the first half. I was running with my friends, and the crowd noise, you miss a lot if you cover up your ears during a marathon. But it just so happens that the Chicago Marathon, the second half of the race, the crowds are sparser than the first and the course itself is a lot less appealing. It goes through some industrial neighborhoods, kind of desolate. So this is what I've been doing: I program play lists exactly as long as I wanted to finish the race in. So that it would help me keep to my pace, knowing when I was arriving at something. I could put in just the song I wanted just when I thought I'd need it.

So you put in the cranking-it-up songs at the end. The song that has become an unbreakable ritual, I always end with, the last song has to be a song called "Invincible" by OK Go. They're a band I'm lucky enough to know, they're from Chicago. It's this totally great song. It's just what you need to hear. That's what I was listening to when I was desperately trying to sprint the last half mile of the marathon so I could qualify for Boston.

Do you know if your guests on the show run? It's funny, one of the side effects of training as hard as I did, was that 1) I was hungry all the time and secondly, I incessantly wanted to talk about running all the time. "Oh, do you run? I run. What's your pace? Ooh. Have you run a marathon? I'm training for a marathon. Ooh. Blah blah blah." I became so self-conscious about it that I wouldn't bring it up because I so did not want to become this absolute bore who just wanted to talk about running all the time. My friends and colleagues would tell you I failed in this. But if I'm at a party and hear someone mention the marathon, I'm like, "Oh, do you use a Garmin?" You become part of this weird subculture.

Do you follow the professional aspect of the sport at all?Not as much. One of the things I've thought about by virtue of running in these big urban marathons, it must be the only kind of athletic event in which technically somebody like me gets to compete against an elite, world-championship-level athlete. We're technically running the same race at the same time. I could beat him. I'm not going to, but I could. I've become interested in who they are, but when you come down to it, elite athletes are really another species. But it's comforting to read their interviews when they talk about the recovery from the marathon and how hard it is. I'm like, I know what they're talking about.

Do you celebrate a good run with a piece of cheesecake? For me, it's not a cheesecake, it's a bag of potato chips. Like a lot of people, I figure the fact that I went out and ran 10 miles this morning means I get to eat whatever I want. I've also become so nervous over the past year about training correctly, that I try not to indulge too much. I became obsessive.

Is there anything you hate about running? There are a lot of days when I hate the first mile. It's just like, Oh my god. I can't believe I'm out here doing this. It's awful. I'm a big sweater. It drives me crazy when I come home from running and I can't stop sweating for an hour. Particularly when I have a social engagement to go to. That's about it. It seems to suit me pretty well.

Can you summarize what running means to you? Here's the great thing for me about it: I am not by nature an athletic person. Whatever combination of brain and brawn and reflexes and muscles make you a talented athlete, I just didn't get a high number in that lottery. The great thing about running is that somebody like me can go out there and actually achieve things. Particularly with this wonderful system of community races where you can enter and do as well as you can despite all that. I can work at it, I can apply myself, I can even learn stuff, my training methods and really achieve something. Someone like me, I can't play basketball well, I'm not a good baseball or softball player, but man, I can go out there and do this. That's a tremendous feeling.

There's also something so wonderfully primal about it that I find very appealing. It's not some sort of elaborate weird skill that's only applicable within the painted confines of whatever game you've chosen. It's this very primal thing that feels almost essential. When I was a kid back in high school and I really transformed myself through running, I would be so proud of the fact that I run. I would imagine these variations on typical adolescent superhero dreams. But my dream would be like, we're 10 miles in the woods and somebody's been bitten by a rattlesnake. And somebody's got to get back to town and get the anti-venom. "Hey, is there anybody here who can run 10 miles?" And I'd be like, "I can!" And I've got to tell you, maybe I'm still an adolescent at heart, but that still kind of resonates. I can get out there and I can run 10 miles without stopping and without even breathing that hard. That's a feeling you can sort of carry around with you all day. No matter what other humiliations you go through, sometimes things don't work out, but whatever else happens to me, I know I can run 10 miles pretty hard.

Peter Sagal is supporting Healthy Schools Campaign as Honorary Team Captain of its 2007 charity team for The LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon. To support this effort, join the team, or learn more about Healthy Schools Campaign?s programs to promote school health and wellness, visit www.active.com